This disclosure relates generally to online systems storing identity information for users, and in particular to improving accuracy of low confidence matches of user identifying information of an online system.
Certain online systems, such as social networking systems, allow their users to connect to and to communicate with other online system users. Users may create profiles on such an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. In some cases, a third party system provides the online system with a list of user identifying information. This information is typically hashed or obscured such that the online system may determine if local information matches this obscured information, but cannot recover any useful data from the obscured information directly.
The user identifying information that is received from the third party system may not be able to uniquely identify a particular user. For example, if the information received is “John Smith, DOB: Oct. 10, 1980,” this might match more than one user in the online system. Thus, the online system may only be able to match a minority of the users to the user identifying information received from the third party system. This creates an inefficient system where a large amount of potentially useful data may be lost.